THE NORTH ATLANTIC-MISSION BASEBALL LEAGUE & ASSOCIATION

For folks who played in this league, you'll find a link to Strike Four below -- all the box scores, recaps and stats from our 23 games, in a word file that I was supposed to print into a book and make available a thousand years ago but didn't have the money probably. I'm putting it here to kind of park it somewhere. Plus, who knows, maybe you wanna see how many doubles you hit off me. No, I really don't know if this matters to anyone besides me but it's at least worth it for the email Curt Scharfe sent the group on the eve of the world series, when he was stuck in Germany with green card issues. It's on the first "page." I, for one, am psyched we kept all these stats. They're fun to see. I pitched 81 innings! I struck out 89 batters! Those are MLB numbers! I also gave up 165 runs on 164 hits and am pretty sure I hit every girl at least once. In 2007 about, I got an email from Mariah Gardener (24 at bats, .500 batting avg.) that said "I miss getting hit by you." L-O-L. Basically, if you played one game, your double, HR, K or triple is in here. I just might not have gotten your name right. And if you played regularly, it's all here.

To explain, the North Atlantic-Mission Baseball League & Association (or, um, ... N. A. M. B.  ... forget it)  was a fast-pitch, hard-ball baseball league, with two teams -- the Treat Street Fingerbangers and Folsom Street Fingerfuckers, which eventually became the Bangers and the Fuckers. It was co-ed and no one who'd played beyond high school was allowed. I'd been yelled at for not throwing to the cut-off man by some bitter AAA cast-off at the one Men's League or whatever it was game I'd played and, since we almost had enough people to field two teams, we put together a game. Also, I wanted to pitch. The first game was fun so we scheduled another. Two teams organically emerged and we ended up playing every Sunday for like 8 months (!). I sent out a recap with cut-and-pasted box scores (lifted from ESPN.com but accurate -- we had a book we kept stats/game info with) every week, so you could keep track of your batting average. The level of ability started out pretty atrocious but, over the course of games every Sunday -- for months -- we got a little better. Things like double-plays and catches in the outfield never became less than a major event but the magical quality of baseball came through and people who had hated sports all their lives became, uh, ball players. We also had a 3-game world series played on consecutive days and a banquet where we passed out trophies for Batting Champ, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and MVP. There were Silver Slugger and Gold Glove awards. We also had the Three Mile Island Meltdown in the 9th Inning Award, the Billy Martin Dead On Christmas Day Award, the Glans Penis Award For Most Foul Tip, etc. At the banquet we wore cleats with our tuxedos and evening gowns. It was pretty awesome.

The link below leads to a download hosted on GoogleDrive and because there's so much lifted HTML and the photos are all copies, not jpegs, you're gonna get all these scary messages:

"The file Strike Four.odt cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents."

"The file is corrupt and cannot be opened."

"Word found unreadable content in this document. If you trust the source of this document, click Yes."

But it's just box scores and filthy language, so just click "Yes" and it should work. If it doesn't and you want the file, email me and I'll just send it to you.

Also sorry for the shoddy formatting, I cleaned it up the best I could. Lemme know if it looks REALLY effed up. Okay, have fun. There are some great pictures in here.


STRIKE FOUR
The Story of The North Atlantic-Mission Baseball League & Association